Mostly tech with some other bits of me

20

Thanks to many conversations and songs today, I’ve been feeling really old. Here are some of the things that have me reminiscing.

Reflecting on Rock

My drives between Akron and Cleveland had me rocking out to songs that I listened to back in high school and early college. Some of these songs in my collection are getting corrupted – as that’s what happens to digital formats over time. So now I’m listening to my collection and trying to sort out what’s good and what’s going away. Today’s adventures had me listening to the likes of Foo Fighters, Dishwalla, Verve Pipe, and Green Day. This is probably one of the coolest modern videos of one of my favorite Foo Fighters song – the Rockin 1000 take on “Learn to Fly”:

With regards to Verve Pipe, I spent many a night listening to their album with “The Freshman”. Oddly enough, though, two of their other songs got to me – “Ominous Man” and “Cup of Tea”. Here’s “Cup of Tea”:

Many nights, dealing with frustrations, I would turn on Dishwalla’s “Charlie Brown’s Parents”:

And a shout out to HN ’98 – to this day, I still sing Audrey on trial when we were not supposed to. Green Day’s “Good Riddance”:

CGI Files

Today, the apprentices had to download Maven, and the URL contained .cgi. The instructor turned back to me and made a comment about how it’s taking us back. All I could think was… Where’s cgi-bin? And is this a Perl script?

Perl was one of the first languages I picked up on my own, learning it from two books – a CGI scripting book from 1995 from PCWorld (if I remember correctly) and Learning Perl from O’Reilly. Yes, my obsession with O’Reilly books has been a long one.

Every time I see CGI, I think of the days of playing with Perl – especially building a blackjack script – and having to put executable server-side scripts in the cgi-bin folder. Oh the memories…

In one of the Java cohorts, we started talking about beans. As it is, OOPSLA ’99 was my very first exposure to Java. I remember hearing the term “bean” while peeking in on sessions at OOPSLA ’99. Java didn’t seem foreign at first – curly braces and semi-colons were familiar to me. I had a little C++ and JavaScript under my belt – so Java’s syntax didn’t scare me. It just made me more curious about this language. The sessions I caught about beans, though, made me realize that I had a lot to learn about the language before I could go building beans. My coursework never did teach beans in Java, so it wouldn’t be until later in life where I could try to make sense of the concept.

Another of the things I caught while at OOPSLA ’99 was this panel discussion – putting the Gang of Four on trial for crimes against Computer Science. Back then, I didn’t really grasp who they were or what design patterns really meant. They didn’t teach us with enough context in the classroom. But I did find the discussions overall amusing. Here’s Brian Foote’s recap of the Show Trial of the Gang of Four. As for who these guys are and what are design patterns, this book explains it all.